Democratic dissatisfaction unveiled: Input, Throughput, Output and the evaluation of the political system from a citizen perspective

During the last decades, scholars have underline the decline in democratic satisfaction among citizens. In order to study such a decline, scholars focus on a classic and easily comparable item asked in multiple comparative survey: Satisfaction with Democracy. This indicator, although being very helpful for cross-country comparison, is not perfect. This research aim to go beyond such an indicator and suggest to mobilize the classical systemic framework of Easton and to apply it from a citizens’ perspective. More specifically, the research investigate to what extent citizens evaluate the input, throughput and output of their political system differently. Using a Latent Profile Analysis with data collected for the Belgian Election Study the results show that a significant portion of citizens tend to evaluate the inputs/throughput/output of the political system differently. Moreover, multivariate analyses show that socio-demographic characteristics are associated with profile belonging. These results underline that reforms aiming at decreasing democratic dissatisfaction could be better targeted by focussing on specific dimensions of the political system.